The Bureau of Transportation Statistics reported Monday that U.S. passenger airlines reported net profits of $507 million in first quarter 2014, compared to a loss of $392 million in first quarter 2013.

Just think how good they would have been if United Airlines wasn’t in the list.

United by itself lost $580 million. Throw it out, and the rest of the industry earned nearly $1.1 billion in first quarter 2014.

Leading the list was American Airlines with net income of $401 million. Merger partner US Airways separately earned $126 million (BTS splits by airline, not by parent company).

American also led the list with the best year-over-year change, up $654 million from last year’s Q1 loss of $235 million.

Net income (ranked by airline size in operating revenues), in millions:

American Airlines and its US Airways subsidiary ranked among the U.S. passenger airlines that saw higher employment in March from a year earlier, according to data released today by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

Employment at all U.S. passenger airlines rose 0.8 percent, or by 3,070 full-time equivalent employees (FTEs), to 383,610. March was the fourth straight month of higher employment from last year.

An American Airlines jet takes off from Washington's Ronald Reagan National Airport. (AP File Photo/J. David Ake)

Employment at many U.S.regional airlines increased more during the year ended March than for larger, traditional airlines, according to data released today by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

Overall, employment at all U.S. airlines rose slightly in March from the previous month and from a year earlier, the data shows. All carriers employed 585,864 people in March, compared with 584,784 in February and 584,285 in March 2013. The numbers include full-time and part-time workers for passenger, charter and cargo airlines.

Fort Worth-based American Airlines’ employment rose 1.3 percent and it was up 3.2 percent at its US Airways subsidiary in the 12-month period. Employment at Dallas-based Southwest Airlines declined 1.4 percent.

U.S. airlines posted an on-time arrival rate of 77.6 percent in March due to better weather, according to a report released today by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

That rate was a big improvement from poor performances in January and February due to severe weather across the country. (See chart above.)

Fort Worth-based American Airlines (including US Airways) ranked fifth with 80.5 percent of its flights on-time. Southwest Airlines (including AirTran Airways) had the second worst performance with 72.9 percent of on-time arrivals.

Hawaiian Airlines was No. 1 with 91.6 percent of its flights arriving on-time. ExpressJet Airlines was the worst at 70.9 percent.

No airline reported a tarmac delay of more than three hours for a U.S. flight. (A British Airways flight from Houston to London sat on the tarmac for more than four hours in March.)

Carriers canceled 1.9 percent of their U.S. flights in March, up from the 1.6 percent a year earlier. Their mishandled baggage rate rose to 3.68 per 1,000 passengers in March from a rate of 3.03 a year earlier.

Molly the cat

American also reported a cat death at 4:30 p.m. on March 31.

After unloading American flight No. 1674, which flies between Dallas/Fort Worth and Miami airports, the crew found an unresponsive black-and-white tuxedo cat named Molly and immediately notified a supervisor, according to the airline’s report filed with the BTS. The cat was taken to a local veterinarian and was pronounced dead.

American said it was unable to determine if the incident occurred during flight.

UPDATED AT 5:15 P.M.: “American Airlines is very committed to safely caring for animals that travel with us,” said spokesman Casey Norton. “We safely transport more than 100,000 pets every year: About half fly in the cabin, and the other half are carried in our temperature-controlled, fully pressurized holds under the cabin.”

UPDATED AT 5:15 P.M.: American has online information about traveling with pets and its pet policies.

U.S. airlines as a whole had a lower percentage of their flights arriving on time in November than in the same month in 2012, according to data released Tuesday.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics said that 83.5 percent of flights for 16 U.S. carriers arrived on time or within 14 minutes of schedule in November. That’s down 2.2 percentage points from November 2012.

In fact, 11 of the 16 showed a year-over-year decline in on-time performance. (One carrier, Endeavor Airlines, didn’t report numbers in November 2012. The former Pinnacle Airlines was acquired in May 2013 by Delta.)

The biggest drop came from Mesa Air, down 7.8 points to 80.6 percent. The two carriers owned by Southwest Airlines — AirTran and Southwest — were close behind. AirTran fell 7.4 points to 83.9 percent, and Southwest declined 6.5 points to 79.5 percent.

The American Airlines Group carriers, American Airlines and US Airways, had some interesting differences.

American reported that 81.9 percent of its flights arrived within 14 minutes of schedule, up 2.3 percent. US Airways had a much better on-time mark, 86.1 percent, but its numbers declined 2 points from November 2012.

The two carriers merged on Dec. 9, 2013, but will operate separately for the foreseeable future. It’ll be interesting to see if their on-time record converges in coming months — and in which direction the performance will move.

So, how many employees has American Airlines dropped since it filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 29, 2011?

The threat at one time was that more than 14,000 jobs would be lost as American cut its costs and workforce. But unions negotiated to lesser reductions, the business stabilized and the cutbacks turned out to be less onerous than threatened.

Even so, American’s total of full-time equivalent employees has dropped more than 7,000, or 11 percent between the end of November 2011 and July 2013, according to Bureau of Transportation Statistics numbers out Thursday.

As you’ll see from the chart above, almost all the cuts were in place by December 2012.

By comparison, regional afffiliate American Eagle has seen its FTE jobs increase by nearly 1,000, or more than 9 percent, during the same period. Without looking at the numbers, we’d speculate that the increase has largely been due to Eagle’s addition of ground-service contracts for other carriers.

Overall, the airline industry had fewer jobs in July than in June or in July 2012. Here’s a chart (two part-time employees equals one full-time equivalent employees):

Travelers on 13 U.S. flights experienced tarmac delays of more than three hours in July, the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics reported today.

However, all but one of those delays occurred on July 22 at New York’s LaGuardia Airport when it was closed after a Southwest Airlines’ runway incident.

On that day, a Dallas-based Southwest flight 345 from Nashville, Tenn., skidded off the runway at LaGuardia and came to rest on its nose after the front landing gear crumpled, federal investigators. Sixteen of the 150 passengers aboard the Boeing 737 were injured.

Southwest said then that the nose-down landing violated its normal procedures.

“At this point in the investigation, no mechanical anomalies or malfunctions have been found,” the National Transportation Safety Board said last month. “A preliminary examination of the nose gear indicated that it failed due to stress overload.”

NTSB officials last month the investigation continues.

In July, the BTS said the longest tarmac delay in July was US Airways flight 2179, which was on the LaGuardia runway for 241 minutes before returning to the terminal. It later resuming course to Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C.